The Wurms of Blearmouth (12 page)

Gust had dropped his hands and was staring up at Heck with his one good eye. “We need to thave her.”

“From what? She’s exactly where she wants to be!”

“But thath theriff wuth ugly!”

“Aye, ugly in that gods-awful lucky way some ugly men have, when it comes to women. Now, good-looking men, with those winning smiles and good skin and whatnot, well, I wish ’em all the evil luck the world can bring, but luckily, we’re not talking about them.” He shook his head. “It don’t matter anyway, Gust. She’s happy and it’s a happy without you or me and that’s what stings.”

Hearing boots crunching on the trail below both turned, momentarily hopeful, until it was clear that there was more than one person coming up on them, and as the newcomers came round a twist in the trail, stepping out from behind an outcrop, Gust rose to stand beside Heck, and both men stared in disbelief.

“You’re alive!” Heck shouted.

Bisk Fatter drew out his sword. “Aye, and we got a thing about being betrayed, Heck Urse.”

“Not uth!” Gust cried.

Wormlick asked, “That you, Gust Hubb? Gods below, what happened to you?”

“Forget it,” snapped Bisk, hefting the sword. “We ain’t no Mowbri’s Choir here, Wormlick, so save the songs of sympathy.”

“I’ll say,” said Sordid, revealing a thin-bladed dagger in one hand and setting its point to the nails of the other in quick succession. “You never could sing, anyway.”

Wormlick glared at her. “What would you know about it? I wouldn’t sing for you if you held my cock in one hand and that knife in the other!”

She laughed. “Oh yes you would, if I asked sweetly.”

“How did you survive?” Heck asked them.

“We shucked off our armour and swam to the damned surface, you fool! But you were already under way, vanishing in the night!”

“Not that,” Heck said. “I meant, how did you survive in each other’s company since then? You all hate each other!”

“Treachery carves a deeper hate than the hate you’re talking about, Heck. Now, we’re here for our cut and then we’re cutting you.”

“Ththill the idiot, eh, Bithk? Why would we cut you in on anything if you’re then going to kill uth?”

“That’s just talk,” said Sordid. “He wasn’t supposed to tell you we’re going to kill you until
after
you gave us our cut. That’s what you get from a fifty-six year old corporal.”

“And you take my orders!” Bisk retorted. “Making you even dumber!”

“I’ll accept that for the truth you just admitted to, sir.”

As Bisk Fatter frowned and tried to work out what she’d just said, Heck Urse cleared his throat and said, “Listen, there wasn’t no cut. We lost it all.”

“We never had ith in the firthth plathe,” Gust added, sitting back down and clutching the side of his head again.

“Sater’s dead,” Heck continued.

“Birds?” Sordid asked.

Heck’s shoulders slumped. “Not you, too?” He sighed. “She’s alive, down in that inn down there.” He gestured at the keep. “We picked up a cargo of trouble in Lamentable Moll, and we were just on our way to demand, er, compensation. Look at Gust. That’s what those bastards did to us.”

“What bastards?” Sordid asked, her sleepy eyes suddenly sharp.

“Necromanthers,” said Gust. “And if thath wuthn’t enouthff, they got Manthy the Thluckthless with ’em!”

“And you want compensation?” Sordid laughed, sheathing her knife. “Corporal, we chased these idiots across the damned ocean. It really is a contest in stupidity here, and this squad you’re now commanding could crush an army of optimists with nary a blink.” Turning, she stared out to sea, started and then said. “Oh, look, here come the Chanters.”

Her next laugh shriveled Heck’s sack down to the size of a cocoon.

With two ashen-faced servants dragging the dead cook away by the feet, Lord Fangatooth grasped hold of Coingood’s arm and pulled him out through the doorway, leaving Bauchelain and his manservant in the steamy kitchen.

“Did you write it all down?”

“Of course, milord—”

“Every word? And who said what?”

Coingood nodded, trying to keep from trembling while still in the clutches of his lord, and the hand encircling his upper arm was spotted with blood, since it was the hand that had driven a knife through the cook’s left eye.

“Find the clever things he said, Scribe, and change them around.”

“Milord?”

“I’m the only one who says clever things, you fool! Make it so I said them—is that too complicated an order for you to comprehend?”

“No, milord. Consider it done!”

“Excellent!” Fangatooth hissed. “Now, walk with me. Leave them to their baking—”

“He’ll poison it, milord—”

“No he won’t. He’s too subtle, and that’s what all this was about—making me look clumsy and oafish. That damned cook! Well, he won’t be messing things up anymore, will he?”

“No, milord. But … who will make the meals?”

“Find someone else. None of that matters now. We need to devise a way of killing them. But cleverly, just to show them. We need genius here, Scribe!”

“But milord, it’s—well, it’s not in my nature to think diabolically.”

Fangatooth shook him. “You think the way I tell you to think!”

“Yes, milord!”

Lord Fangatooth held up his fist and said, “This is a game of murder, my friend, and I mean to win it or die trying!”

Emancipor found a jug the contents of which smelled vaguely alcoholic. He downed a mouthful, and then another. The taste was sweet, cloying, and it burned his throat and made his sinuses drain down the back of his mouth, and then his eyes started watering fiercely. Grunting, he drank some more.

“Power that lacks subtlety,” said Bauchelain as he gathered and began lining up a half dozen wooden bowls of varying sizes, “betrays a failure of the intellect. Do you think, Mister Reese, it is safe to say that our host lacks certain nuances, degrading the very notion of tyranny? The veil is absent. Sleight of hand unimagined. The obfuscation of language and the unspoken threat are revealed as, well, let’s be honest, as unexplored realms in this lord’s mind. All of this, I must admit, is disappointing.”

“Well, master, this is a backwater holding, after all.”

“There is grit in this flour,” Bauchelain said. “A millstone needs replacing. I am afraid I made no note of the dentition of our host or his servants, but I imagine we would see teeth worn down, chipped and gouged. Backwater indeed, Mister Reese, as you say.” Dusting his hands, he stepped over to Emancipor and gently pried the jug from Reese’s hand. “Extract of the vanilla bean, Mister Reese, is rather expensive. I believe you have already drunk down a month’s wages, so it is well that the cook is no longer alive to witness such sacrilege.”

“Master, my stomach is on fire.”

“I imagine it would be. Will you survive?’

“No.”

“Your pessimism has lost whatever charm it once possessed, Mister Reese.”

“Must be all the poisons, Master, squirreling my brain. Thing is, everywhere I look, or even think of looking, I see doom and disaster, hoary and leering. Shades in every corner and heavy clouds overhead. I ain’t known good luck in so long I’d not know the lad’s face if it up and kissed me.” He set about finding another jug. He needed something to quell the fires in his gut.

“Do you like cookies, Mister Reese?”

“Depends, Master.”

“Upon what?”

“What I been smoking, of course.”

“I suggest that you constrain your blends, Mister Reese, to simple rustleaf.”

“You don’t want me to eat your cookies, Master? I thought you said you weren’t going to poison them.”

Bauchelain sighed. “Ah, Mister Reese, perhaps I only wish to see them shared out fairly among our hosts. It is, after all, the least we can do for their hospitality.”

“Master, they tried to kill us.”

Bauchelain snorted. “It is a kindness calling such crude efforts an attempt to kill us. Tell me, do you know how to make icing?”

Emancipor scratched at his whiskers, and then shrugged. “Seen the wife do it enough times, so, aye, I suppose.”

“Ah, your wife baked?”

“No, she just made icing. In a big bowl, and then ate it all herself, usually in one night. Once a month, every month. Who can fathom the mind of a woman, eh, Master? Or even a wife.”

“Not any man, surely. Or husband.”

Emancipor nodded. “That’s a fact, Master. Mind you, I doubt most women can fathom each other, either. They’re like cats that way. Or sharks. Or those river fish with all the sharp teeth. Or crocodiles, or snakes in a pit. Or wasps—”

“Mister Reese, do get on with that icing, will you? Korbal Broach so loves icing.”

“Sweet tooth, then.”

“I suppose it shows,” Bauchelain said in a tolerant murmur. “So like a child, is my companion.”

Emancipor thought about that, conjuring in his mind Korbal’s broad, round face, the flabby lips, the pallor and the small, shallow eyes. He then thought about children, envisaging a toddling Korbal Broach running in a pack of runts, big-toothed smile and a snippet of hair on that now bald head. He shuddered.
The fools. They should’ve known. One look, and they should’ve known. Those kind you do away with, head in a bucket, left out in the snows overnight, accidentally mixed up with the dog food, don’t matter how, you just do away with them, and if the world trembles to your crime, relax, that was the rattle of relief.
Aye, that boy running with his gang, a gang that kept getting smaller, with all those pale parents wondering where their children vanished to, and there stood young Korbal Broach, face empty and eyes emptier.
They should’ve known. Priests can’t cure them, sages can’t unlearn them, jailers don’t want them.

Bundle him in a sack of lard and raw meat and dump the whole mess into a pit of starving dogs, aye. But who am I fooling? Children like Korbal never die. Only the nice ones die, and for that alone the world deserves every damned curse a decent soul could utter.
“Master?”

“Mister Reese?”

“You done with that vanilla?”

“That’s right,” said Spilgit, “two shovels.”

Gravedigger looked up blearily from the heap of dead people’s clothes that he’d sewn together to make a mattress and pillow. “That’s
my
job,” he said, reaching for the clay jug, his arm snaking out like a withered root to tangle hairy fingers in the jug’s ear, then drag it across the floor back to his bed.

“You look settled in, friend,” said Spilgit. “I’ve been temporarily barred from the Heel, you see, and well, a man needing to stay warm has to work. Physical work, I mean.”

“You gonna use a shovel in each hand, then?”

“That’s a silly idea, isn’t it?”

“Right. So the other shovel, what’s that for? Taxes? You taxing my one shovel and claiming the other as payment?”

“I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink.”

“Too much and what you’re saying might make sense. Too bad for you, then, isn’t it?”

“Taxation doesn’t work that way.”

“Yes it does.” Gravedigger drank.

“All right, it does work that way. You keep one shovel and the tax collector takes the other one, and uses it to build you a nice level road.”

“Oh yeah? So how come it’s me building that road, breaking my back and using my own shovel to do it with? While you sit there doing nothing, but you got a key in your pocket, and that’s the key to a giant vault full of shovels. So tell me again, what good are you to anyone?”

“This is ridiculous,” Spilgit said. “People have different talents. You build roads, or in this case, dig graves, and I do the collecting, or in this case, er, dig the graves.”

“Exactly, so take one shovel and go to it.”

“But I’d like both shovels.”

“Once a tax collector, always a tax collector.”

“Listen, you drunk fool! Give me the shovels!”

“I ain’t got two shovels. I only got the one.”

Spilgit clutched his head. “Why didn’t you say so?”

The man tipped the jug again, swallowed, and wiped his mouth. “I just did.”

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“Your shovel.”

“You tax that shovel away from me and I ain’t got no more work, meaning I don’t earn nothing, meaning you can’t tax a man who don’t earn nothing, meaning you’re useless. But you know you’re useless, don’t you, and that’s why you want to take up grave digging, so you got yourself a real job, but what about me?”

“Are you going to loan me your shovel or not?”

“Loan now, is it? You gotta pay for that, mister.”

“Fine,” Spilgit sighed. “How much?”

“Well, seeing as I’m renting the shovel from Hallig the pig trencher, and he’s charging me a sliver a dig, for you it’ll have to be two slivers, or I don’t see any profit for my kindness.”

“Kindness means you don’t charge anything!”

“I’m a business man here, Tax Collector.”

“If you rent me that shovel, I’ll have to tax your earnings.”

“How much?”

“A sliver.”

“Then I make nothing.”

Spilgit shrugged. “I doubt anyone’d ever claim renting shovels was a profit-making enterprise.”

“Hallig does.”

“Listen, that damned shovel is leaning outside your front door. I could have come up here and just taken it and you’d never have known the difference.”

Gravedigger nodded. “That’s a fact.”

“But I thought to do this legitimately, as one neighbour to another.”

“More fool you.”

“I see that,” Spilgit snapped.

“Now what, then, Mister Tax Collector?”

“I’m taxing you that shovel.”

Gravedigger shrugged. “Go ahead, now it’s Hallig’s problem. Only the next time you need to bury somebody, don’t bother coming to me. I’m now unemployed.”

“I’ll loan you a shovel from the vault.”

“Right, and I suppose you want me to be grateful or something. Is it any wonder tax collectors are despised?”

Spilgit watched the man take another drink, and then he left the shack, collected up the shovel, and then, noticing another shovel beside it, he collected that one too, and headed off.

Red huddled in the wet cave with nothing but bones for company. Just below, down a slant of bedrock, the seas surged with foam and uprooted trees from some tumbled cliff-side; and with each thunderous wave Red’s refuge grew more precarious as water rolled up and over the rock.